Real Time Genomics Appoints Steve Lombardi as CEO

Real Time Genomics, Inc. announced the appointment of genomics industry veteran Steve Lombardi as the company’s President and Chief Executive Officer. Lombardi will lead the company as it commercializes its highly scalable, patented, core technology for use in next generation genomic analysis.

“We are pleased to have someone of Steve’s caliber join RTG as CEO,” stated Mark Silverman, Partner at Catamount Ventures, the private company’s lead venture investor. “His knowledge of the genomics marketplace and extensive industry relationships make him a perfect fit for the company. With Steve on board, we see RTG making a substantial impact in accelerating customers’ ability to utilize genomic content in research and in the clinic.”

Lombardi has 30+ years of commercial biotechnology experience. He has led the commercialization of key technologies that have defined modern molecular biology, and has been responsible for the largest and fastest growing product lines in the life science tools industry. From 2006 to 2010, Lombardi was President and then CEO of Helicos BioSciences. From 2002 to 2006, he was a senior executive at Affymetrix running corporate development and business management. From 1986 to 2002, Lombardi held increasingly responsible positions at Applied Biosystems in product, sales and business management, including general management of their DNA sequencing business, during which time annual revenues in his division grew from $10M to ~$800M.

“Bioinformatics and computational biology are the next big frontier in genomics,” said Steve Lombardi. “Advances in tools and applications that allow scientists to interpret and extract value from NGS data have driven a renaissance in sequence-based genetic analysis. My goal is to build RTG into the market leader of next generation genomic analysis based on the company’s unique technology. I am excited about working with a great team to make RTG a valuable contributor to the advancement of genomic science and a leading company in the genomics industry.”

The Real Time Genomics mission is to further enable the genomics revolution by providing the best genomics analysis software in the industry. The first step in fulfilling that mission is to apply its patented core technology to solve the bottleneck that currently limits large scale genomic analysis. Today, RTG software addresses some of the most demanding applications of high-throughput sequence data, like providing comprehensive variant detection and metagenomic analysis pipelines. As an example, a complete RTG solution for high-throughput metagenomics was developed in collaboration with The Genome Institute at Washington University in St. Louis for use in the Human Microbiome Project.

“The appointment of Steve Lombardi as CEO is a significant enhancement for Real Time Genomics,” said George Weinstock, Associate Director, The Genome Institute and Professor of Genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. “His industry experience and relationships are invaluable to an emerging company like RTG that has developed a great base of technology. Steve’s industry intuition complements the company’s existing technical know-how and provides an important new ingredient for maturing their technology into world class genomics products.”